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With the door open, we can see the 8x 2.5″ hot-swap bays, the front i/o, and a removable dust filter for the 2x 80mm fans. While the case advertises that it supports a card up to 8.66″ (220mm) in length, it also needs to sit lower than 2.39″ (60.75mm) to slip under the bay. Under the 8-bay 2.5” cage is a single 2.5” drive cage for an OS SSD. This cage can be removed if space is needed underneath. Technically, this makes the unit a 9x 2.5″ chassis. SilverStone CS280 HDD Cage I have two primary concerns with regards to the performance of my NAS: throughput and power consumption. The throughput of the machine determines how useable it winds up being, and the power consumption typically determines how much it’s going to wind up costing me on a recurring basis. Naturally, there are untold other possible metrics that could be of interest; these are just the two that wind up of the most interest to me. Are there any benchmarks that I’ve overlooked? Please leave a comment for any metrics you’d like to see in future NAS builds. Power Consumption This one was built in 2018, but I reused the name from a previous build. This is the 8th FreeNAS unit I have built for home. Eight systems in ten years... I made some mistakes along the way, learned some and I try to share some of those lessons learned experiences here in the forum. I have even put together some hardware just to test things out a time or two...
Had I used Silverstone’s low-profile CP11 SATA cables, this job would have been a lot more friendly. It’s a pretty clean look and the little SATA cables are so much easier to manage in both flexibility and organization. I’m not sure how detectable it is in the assembly’s video, but I ran into two problems immediately in the BIOS and then on the next boot. The CS380 is for ATX / micro-ATX, so there's a wide range of mobos that will fit. I'm currently considering a dual-Xeon one.I personally felt like this was a missed opportunity to a case that I was genuinely excited to work with. Sitting next to the Silverstone CS280 is my ugly betty, the Cooler Master Elite 110. It’s used as a Plex transcoding server and with an MSI GTX 760 ITX GPU and it doubles as a light gaming rig when guests come over for the occasional LAN party. Given what I’ve experienced of FreeNAS-11.2-U2, I’m looking forward to getting it installed and configured on my own NAS here in the very near future! Conclusion
Great airflow to the internal components thanks to two well placed 80mm fans and a large intake vent. The DS380 will support DTX mobos, which in theory can have two slots, but after a lot of searching, it turned out that there actually aren't any such mobos in existence, let alone storage-oriented ones. The design of the Node 804 is based on the two-compartment cube design. It also competes with the Thermaltake Cores and the Corsair Carbide Air in that category. But it outshines them for a NAS build, with the ability to house 10 3.5″ drives. The hallmark Fractal attention-to-detail is present here, which sets it apart from the rest of our list. For beginners building their first NAS, this case is very forgiving. How would I wind up making my DIY NAS builds even smaller? Find out what’s taking up the most amount of space–the hard drives–and replace them with something smaller! The footprint of a single 3.5” hard drive is about 147mm x 101.6mm x 25.4mm for a volume of 376.77 cm 3. The smaller 2.5” hard drive form factor is 100mm x 69.85mm x 19mm for a volume of 132.72 cm 3. A 2.5” hard drive is roughly 35% the size of its bigger brother. When you multiply that savings in space across 8 HDDs, the amount of space saved adds up to something impressive. CPU & Motherboard The ITX-sized GPU (6.7″/170.18mm x 4.7″/119.38mm) wouldn’t fit into the PCIe slot due to the positioning of the hot-swap bay.Removal of the front cover (should you ever need to replace the 2x 80mm fans) requires that a total of 13 screws be removed. Ultimately, space is what mattered the most in this blog, and I think that I’ve been unquestioningly successful in that regard. The amount of space that the DIY NAS: 2019 Edition takes up (11.8 liters) is nearly half of what the prior year’s NAS used up (21.6 liters). It’s been quite a few years since I built my NAS, but given what I know of my data-storage habits today, I probably would have been quite comfortable to trade a bit of storage capacity to build an even smaller NAS. But Brian, your conclusion is WRONG! The hardware in this year’s NAS compared to last year’s DIY NAS build are a bit less powerful, and that shows up in the benchmarks. The performance over the Gigabit in the sequential write, random read, and random write tests were all lower than both last year’s NAS and my own NAS. Given the amount of money spent, I expected this year’s NAS to have a hard time competing against last year’s NAS. The fact that this year’s NAS didn’t outperform my own was a bit disappointing. FreeNAS-11.2-U2
As a NAS user myself (QNAP) the thought of replacing my HTPC+QNAP hardware with something inside the CS280, is an incredibly enticing proposition. There's also a good chance that I'll be able to completely eliminate a computer from the home inventory: I'm thinking of running OS X in emulation, which will allow me to avoid replacing my current MacBook Pro with another physical Mac (I've been less and less happy with Apple's HW offerings for years, and they've now crossed my red lines). Keeping your build cool is still a priority in a NAS rig. But how you do it may be a little different than usual. Supermicro A2SDI-H-TP4F: 16 cores, up to 12 SATA devices, 2x10Gb RJ45, 2x10GB SFP+, actively cooled.This case is something you’d love to have on your desk, as unlike many NAS cases, it looks quite good. The matte finish and angular design may not keep up with the newest trends in mainstream tower case design. But the understated look is quite acceptable for most people. One feature that we find a big plus is the removable air filter at the front of the two 80mm cooling fans built into the case. We also like the removable dust filter in front of the two cooling fans, this greatly aids in keeping inside the case dust free and allows for removal and cleaning.
The chassis was well protected inside two sheets of high-density foam. The cardboard box felt robust enough to survive the journey and it held up really well.So what did I wind up deciding to do in 2019? Make it even smaller! I’ve always preferred making my NAS builds diminutive on account of my limited desk space. Additionally, what I saw as one of the biggest advantages in comparing a DIY NAS build to the off-the-shelf NAS offerings from folks like Drobo, QNAP, Synology, et al. is the fact that the off-the-shelf NAS machines are nearly always compact. In building my own NAS, I wanted to demonstrate that a DIY builder could do it better! While the design might be tried and true, it does prove to be problematic a little later into the review. The size of your case is similarly variable. Larger cases will have more options for drives and cooling. Smaller cases will be easier to maintain and even carry around.
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